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I have been prayerfully reading through ‘The Pursuit of God’ and was struck by something Tozer said about the role that our ‘senses’ play in being in touch with God and reality.

“With his five senses he engages this real world. All things necessary to his physical existence he apprehends by the faculties with which he has been equipped by the God who created him and placed him in such a world as this.”

The context of this quote is that we are ever aware of the reality of God through the five senses that He has given us. We see, hear, and feel God all around us…all of which leave us with the undeniable fact that He exists. This begs the question, then why don’t we feel closer to Him all of the time?

“The world of sense intrudes upon our attention day and night for the whole of our lifetime. It is clamorous, insistent and self-demonstrating. It does not appeal to our faith; it is here, assaulting our five senses, demanding to be accepted as real and final. But sin has so clouded the lenses of our hearts that we cannot see that other reality, the City of God, shining around us. The world of sense triumphs. The visible becomes the enemy of the invisible; the temporal, of the eternal. That is the curse inherited by every member of Adam’s tragic race.”

Shortly after I read this, knowing that I wanted to write a blog post today, I was having trouble connecting to the internet. So I called Apple and the representative who was working with me put me on hold. And so while waiting I decided to resume my daily Bible reading (yes I know I have an issue with multi-tasking). While on hold, the background (elevator music) came on. It was then that the background music took me on a trip back in time as I heard Bob Dylan singing, ‘Hey Mister Tambourine Man’.

In that instant I connected with what Tozer was saying. There I was reading the Word when my sense of hearing, listening to Bob Dylan, was intruding upon my attention to hear from the Word. It was then that I realized how many times this must happen in the course of a day, “the visible becoming an enemy of the invisible”. We get so used to those interruptions that we think, for some crazy reason, that we can’t live without them.